It took twenty years of dedicated international technological collaboration, three hundred billion dollars and seven months of flight through interplanetary space to get us to Mars; it took just a single crack in the ceramic ring of the landing vehicle’s booster exhaust to seal our fate and make Mars the place where I will spend my final few hours.

The rest of the crew are dead. When the booster failed the landing craft was descending at over forty kilometres per hour, and was still five hundred vertical metres from touchdown. The unbalanced loss of thrust from the front corner of the ship sent us careering off at a lateral tilt until we ploughed sidelong onto the Martian surface. Cheng, our captain, died on impact, and Second Officer Hawkins’ helmet cracked against the communications panel as the ship rolled over to an abrupt stop. With loss of cabin integrity, he simply suffocated as his suit depressurised into the thin Martian atmosphere. I alone am left, dazed but unharmed.

Although our main ship, the SS Mayflower, is orbiting robotically several miles above me, I have no way back. The landing vehicle is damaged beyond redemption: my umbilical cord is cut, as it were. I don’t even have any way of letting mission control know I am still alive: in fact, they don’t even know yet that anything is wrong. Radio communications, travelling at the speed of light, take twenty-five minutes to get to Earth from this distance. In five minutes, there will be a huge panic in Houston as they hear of our booster trouble a few seconds before the signal goes dead forever. I think of Cheng and Hawkins’ voices encoded in radio messages still out there hurtling through the ether and feel strangely comforted.

I have four hours left to live, more or less. That is the limit of the oxygen supply I have left in my suit. I could probably double that by scavenging from my dead comrades, but what good would that serve? I always had a suspicion that this would be a one-way trip, and I barely dared to dream that we would make it here, never mind get home again.

When I think of what this accident means for the international space program, I realise that it may be decades before another manned trip is attempted, and who knows, our remains may never be found. Nevertheless, I hope that one day this message might be retrieved from my suit’s voice recorder so that the world knows what happened to us. I want you to know that in its most important sense, our mission succeeded: I was the first man ever to set foot on another planet. Despite everything, we made it.

The mechanical override on the hatch was undamaged in the crash, and although getting out sideways in the suit was tricky, I managed to get through and lower myself down far enough to simply drop inelegantly through the last couple of metres onto the Martian surface. That is why, for posterity, my first, unheard and deeply unprofound words as I stepped onto the red planet were “that was certainly no small step.”

That was ten minutes ago, and I remain rooted here in trembling awe. The pictures sent back to Earth from Mars by the various robotic missions over the years have always been taken during the Martian day so that as many surface details could be discerned as possible, but nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of the Martian night. With no artificial lights of any kind anywhere and no large moon to light the night, stars billow in their thousands over a pristine landscape that glistens faintly red in the starlight. As I survey the sky, I note close to the horizon the tiny blue star-like dot of the unbelievably distant Earth, as no-one has seen it before.

I am further from another living soul than anyone has ever been, by a factor of several thousand. I am completely, permanently and irreversibly isolated, and yet somehow I feel exalted. To feel loneliness to a degree that no-one else has ever felt it, to have the fear of an imminent and inescapable death, yet at the same time to feel the attainment as an individual of one of the shared dreams of humanity, fills me with a profound sense of communion with all of humankind, for I alone know all at once the depths of its worst despair and the heights of its greatest achievement.

I have never felt so alive.

Popular wisdom held that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. For Jonah, there was now only one. Static. It never snowed on Lark One. It never snowed anywhere on the Moon. But Jonah’s days were filled with the sound of snow, emanating from every speaker when he performed his routine radio checks.

He did not mind. Jonah had grown up in Minnesota, and was accustomed to seeing the snow return every year, and he loved the sound of it. As a kid, he’d watched eagerly at the window as the soft white flakes drifted down and blanketed his world. Snow wiped out all the hard edges, all the ugliness and harsh colors, made everything pure. And the gentle hiss as it fell was the harbinger of that purity.

And when the world went to war, and Jonah marched along with everyone else, he watched the smoke-darkened skies for a glimpse of that white to return and smother the conflict. But the snow didn’t come, and the war raged on.

Still, he’d found snow again on the Moon. If he closed his eyes, he could barely tell the difference. There was the sound of snow. He was just as trapped inside Lark One as he ever had been in a blizzard. And he was alone. Utterly alone.

Lark One was a last-ditch effort. It was increasingly obvious that the war wasn’t going to stop this time. Humanity was tired of itself, and it was turning to the same solution it had always used to solve its problems. So. Set up a cache of everything that might be needed to start again. People – adults, embryos, sperm and eggs. All frozen to maintain their viability. Animals likewise. Plants. Seeds. Tools. Multiple redundancies. Put ‘em all someplace far, far away from the conflict. Mankind had never gotten around to the conquest of space. The Moon was still virgin territory. That would do.

And put somebody up there to watch over it all. Only one would be needed. The computer could run most things. And no more soldiers could be spared, anyway.

Radio check again. Jonah turned the dial to the proper frequency, waiting for a signal. There was only static. A lesser man might have assumed that the sound was the death knell of the planet below. Jonah knew better. The enemy was tricky. The static could be jamming. He had his orders. They said to wait until the proper signal was received. Jonah would follow his orders. They were all he had, trapped in Lark One, his companions frozen or simply unborn. His stylus made a tick on his pad. Radio check negative.

Lunchtime. Jonah heated a meal in Lark One’s galley, a room almost indistinguishable from the others. He ate in silence and listened to the sound of snow. Spaghetti. He’d had it every day this week. He varied the food only from week to week – he didn’t want to run through all his options.

Radio check. Static. Tick.

Relaxation time. He watched a musical. Action movies reminded him of war, travelogues and romances of what he was missing. There was a whole section of pornography – his commanding officers knew what it was like for a man alone in the field – but he prided himself that he’d never touched it. He was stronger than that. He had his orders to keep him going. And the sound of snow.

Radio check. Hiss. Tick.

Exercise time. The Moon’s gravity was weak. Jonah needed to stay in shape. It was all there in the orders. He would have done the same back home in Minnesota. A man could grow weak and flabby when the snow kept you indoors. Physically and mentally. You had to stay strong.

Radio check. And Jonah lifted his head as an almost alien sound emerged from the speakers.

“…corded message. To Lark One. It’s over. Do you read? We’re all dead. Everyone. Everything. They’re blasting through the doors now. We already hit them. Mutually assured… Lark One, please receive! It’s up to you now. Come back. Start over again. Do it right this time. Lark One, we’ll put this on automatic, cycle through frequencies. This is a prerec…oh, God, no!”

The voice broke up, began again. Jonah listened through a second time, carefully. And as the message started a third time, he gently reached out with his stylus and nudged the frequency knob. The sound of snow filled the speakers, and his mind, washing his thoughts in white. There. That was better. The enemy was tricky. So very tricky. It wanted to take him away from the peace and the snow. But Jonah was stronger than that.

Tick.

The doctor looked over the body in the bed curled up in fetal position, and shook his head. “I get a feeling this one is never coming back,” he said.

“The brain waves look normal,” a nurse responded, looking at the monitor.

“Actually, there is a high amount of activity,” the doctor said. “I have seen one other case like this though. Too many shocks to the system too quickly. His wife leaving him, him finding out she cleaned out his accounts, then her murder by her supposed new lover, all in the space of 24 hours.”

“Can’t he hear or see us?”

The doctor pointed at the monitor. “His eyes are open, but no vision is registering on his brain; that sector is dark, so is hearing. The activity is all going on in the thinking part of his brain here,” he said pointing at the screen. “He has us all shut out. He is the only person in his world”

~~~~~~~~~~~

I awoke and gazed at the beautiful meadow in front of me. There was a cool breeze blowing that smelled something like peppermint. The sun was glowing red in a purple sky as I got up and levitated over the ground. It was so peaceful here. I could hear birds singing in the distance, and there were all sorts of animals around, all friendly to both me and each other. I approached a wooded area and arose to treetop height to see the birds. They saw me and sang sweetly. There was a nest of eggs, and I observed one little bird being born, pecking its way out of its egg. The look on its face when it emerged was so humorous I had to laugh. The little fellow had an expression that said “OK, I am out of there. Now what?”

I noticed movement on the ground and lowered myself to have a better look. A cat was playing with a rabbit; it would chase the rabbit’s tail until it noticed its own, then it would chase it. I love this place. I am never leaving.

~~~~~~~~

The orderlies wheeled some new equipment into the room and placed it next to the bed. The doctor powered it up, and carefully placed electrodes on the patients scalp. He saw the nurse looking at him curiously.

“I am going to try stimulating the parts of the brain for sight- if those start working we might be able to break through his coma. We are on entirely new ground here though, nobody has been able to bring a patient out of this type of coma to date. Sometimes they come out on their own, sometimes they never do.”

“So you are hoping to write all this up in a journal?”

He looked at her. “I am hoping to help this patient regain his mental health.”

~~~~~~~~~

The meadow was peaceful again today, so tranquil. There was some rain off in the distance and I was treated to a beautiful rainbow. A large colorful butterfly came up to me; it was almost like he wanted me to follow him. I did so, stopping when he got side-tracked by a sweet smelling flower. We slowly made our way across the meadow in this fashion.

I made my way back to the meadow, and discovered the butterfly was nowhere around. I soon forgot about him while enjoying the pleasures of the field of wildflowers.

~~~~~~~~

The nurse looked over at the doctor who was clearly distraught. “I almost had him,” he said. “The brain was starting to recognize the visual stimulus before he withdrew into the coma again.

“How do you know he wants to come out?” the nurse asked.

“He is comatose. He can’t want or not want anything,” the doctor fumed, then turned and left the room.

The nurse stared at the door, then went over to the patient. “You are all right, you stay where you want to stay,” she whispered in his ear, then kissed it. Then she also left the room.

~~~~~~~~

A bird spoke to me today. Well, not really speaking, but by its song I knew. It said I was welcome to stay in the meadow forever. I am happy here. I never want to leave.

His cocoon sheds another sliver of ice. His cave is empty, barren and unchanged while time outside has moved forward. They will be here soon. The melting marks another year and another task he is doomed to repeat. He will remember the changes in the world, catalog the differences and note the terrible toll he exacted on his last sojourn under his captors’ yoke.

Drip.

The echoing machinations from below reach up to his arctic prison. The tintinnabulations of their hammers keep time to an ancient runic rhyme. They will come with their contagion and with their bile and set him upon the world burdened with their charge. Hours or days, he can no longer tell for what is a day to a man entombed for centuries? He envied mortals their certain death. He envied Prometheus and his eagle. Any sensation is a welcome rather than this embrace of nothingness. He envied the dwarves their stoic gift. Passing time as stone, to the dwarves an eon is an afternoon. As a dwarf, he could wait for his captors to die, and for their children’s children to die, and for the last damnable one to die.

Drip.

Never trust an elf, he thought. Fairies are just as duplicitous and jealous, but their bonds are breakable. Flaws can be found and fairies can be distracted. He should have known better than to share his secrets after Morgaine turned on him. He should have been wiser than to open his book. Her beauty blinded him and her ambition was his undoing. That was a lesson hard learned, but not well enough.

Drip.

He can see the walls of the cave now. A thinning sheen of ice obscures his vision of the exit. They will block him and bind him to their will before he has a chance. Despite the depth of the winter night he could see the billowing drifts just beyond the cave. They may be late, he thought and hoped. Despite the fierce storms, the numbing wind and the treacherous terrain his masters always arrived. Their furnaces and hatred heated the prison from below. They know when he thawed and were never late.

Drip.

Sensation returns to his hand as he flexes his fingers. They tingle and burn as he feels them draw close. They bring filth and disease to spread and spew forth. They must flush the vileness from their world and into another lest it choke them. He is their conduit, their release valve, bound to their command. This was not the duty he agreed to those many years past.

Drip.

He steps forward free from his sarcophagus but not from duty. One enters carrying the dust of every base impulse, sin, and hatred.

Eyes downcast, he asks “Again?”

“Again.”

The bag passes and he moves on to visit the children of the world leaving a dusty trail of terror. This is their curse, and his.

Ho. Ho. Ho. Merry Christmas.

On a deserted highway, on the deserted North American continent, on a deserted planet, was Lynn Shreeve. She was riding an ATV down Highway 17 South, heading toward the coast. She decided to use her small all terrain vehicle for its nimbleness; dodging abandoned cars and trucks was much easier than with a car of her own. Top speed was sacrificed, but she no longer had appointments to keep.

Five years ago she woke up to a dying world, though she didn't understand the extent of the situation at the time. As she walked around outside, Lynn saw vehicles that had run into each other, or houses, or ditches, as if their drivers had leapt out, stunt man style. All up and down the streets were cars running, with not a single person in sight. Bicycles were unattended in the street, and she even saw a few dog collars with leashes still attached, laying by the roadside.

Lynn had run back inside an switched on the TV, only to see the test pattern. Then, as if on cue, the power went out. She tried the telephone...nothing.

The rest of that day, as well as quite a few that followed, were lost in shadow.

Lynn had had a long time to get used to having the whole planet to herself, and as time wore on, she got used to the idea of being totally alone. Strangely, she was unaffected by the loss of her loved ones.

No, not loss. Absence. If a parent or sibling is murdered, or has a heart attack, that hurts because you know they're gone for good. But with this...vanishing, there was at least a small feeling that they could pop back any time.

Lynn eventually got a hold of herself, and when the shock wore off she achieved acceptance. Knowing she'd never learn what happened to earth's inhabitants, she set off to do some research. She figured you couldn't remove nearly all living, breathing creatures from the planet without dire consequences, so she visited university libraries and learned something that alarmed her greatly. With no one (besides herself) to breath in the oxygen that the planets' trees and plants were still producing, they would start dying on the now-poisonous, oxygen-rich atmosphere. She herself would suffer as well; nose bleeds and headaches to start, and much worse later on.

Seeing her exit, she snapped back to the present. Whirring along, she stopped by certain stores to replenish her supplies; glow sticks, bottled water and purifying tablets, matches and sunscreen were important, as were some carefully selected canned and processed food items. She even picked up a kite.

Walking about the empty stores no longer made her self-conscious. Early on she felt a little like a shoplifter, but now it was just something else that occupied time.

Hearing the ocean cheered Lynn up a bit; she loaded her items into the trailer and headed for the cottage her parents owned. Had owned. Riding past the houses, she saw signs of past life, as always; next to one car was a bucket and sponge, with a now dry hose laying nearby, in another yard was a pinata hanging from a tree limb, with a broom handle beneath.

Arriving at the cottage, she unloaded her few possession and went out to the back deck. Looking up and down the coast revealed no surprises; not a single person or animal was in sight. No seagulls in the air, and she was sure that there were no crabs on the beach, or fish in the sea.

She sat in a chair, kicked her feet up and closed her eyes. The only sounds were of the wind blowing inland, and the constant dull roar of the ocean. It was peaceful; here her isolation didn't seem so painfully out of place.

Listening to the waves breaking, Lynn though about one of her science teachers talking about the history of the earth; how, if you imagined the lifespan of the planet on a clock, from its formation until the present, it would only be 4:15 in the morning, or something like that. She now imagined a mysterious, celestial hand appearing out of thin air and, with a single finger, moving the hands until it was 11:59pm, and wondering how much time that really left.

With her eyes still closed, Lynn thought of one of the few items in her trailer she didn't bring up. It was a revolver, with five of the six rounds removed from the cylinder. She estimated that it's been close to six years since she found herself alone in the world, but she felt that she still didn't need the gun just yet.

She retrieved her kite and walked down to the beach...

The tile was cold beneath her cheek. The cool sensation relaxed her feverish mind and allowed for some clarity of thought. She blinked once…twice…bringing her eyes into focus, wincing at the sight of herself. She attempted to shift from her awkward position without causing pain, but a gasp escaped her throat as her inner thighs brushed ever so lightly.

The razor in her was why the small motion hurt so badly; the thin layer of blood covering its sharp edge matched the angry red marks on her legs. Her hair was matted from tossing her head to and fro; eyes dry from the briny drops they had borne. She dropped the razor and with a sharp clink it landed on the floor. Her were motions slow, her head fogged. Wet lines remained on her blotchy red cheeks, she didn’t bother wiping them away, because it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

Her eyes lazily traced the swirled pattern on the ceiling as she contemplated her next move.

She turned her head to look at the razor on the floor and mentally thanked it. Thanked it for helping her spill her pain, her fear, her blood. Blood, the very fluid that gave her life was her torment, the less of it within her the better, the less of it within her the closer she was to eternal sleep. Waking up in the morning was a curse; looking in the mirror was torture. She thanked it for bringing her that much closer to her peace.

But his words echoed in her ears and she couldn’t stop them. He didn’t know the words that would sweep another girl off her feet brought her to the floor. He didn’t know how often she laid out like this, barely clothed and covered in her own blood. No one knew, for that matter. She wouldn’t tell them; she couldn’t tell them. They would try to stop her from one day finding the strength to leave this world. All for the better anyway, she would figure, no one would care.

No, she thought quickly, reminding herself. He would care. He would care and his tears would burn her soul, weight it to the fiery depths below, allowing her no release from the world. No release from his paralyzing eyes.

Her mind screamed obscenities mixed with his romances, echoing the taunts of the people at school and the people at home, clashing with his attempts at calming her with his sugared words; he didn’t love her, and she wasn’t pretty, she knew it, and nothing he could say would help. The others…the other people were right.

To further prove to herself that he was wrong, that the rest of the world knew better than he did, she sat up slowly to look at herself in the mirror and began to pull her features to pieces. Her hair was curly or straight by turns, never wavy, but sectioned oddly and knotted easily. Her forehead was high and wide and had a habit of hiding the fact that she had hair atop her head when looking at her dead on. Her nose too short, her mouth too small, ears too big, and jaw too heavy. Her chin was rounded until she spoke, when it squared off while her stutter turned her baby round cheeks red. Her body continued to a long neck and wide shoulders with tiny arms, large hands and boxy fingers. Her chest too large for her frame, waist nonexistent above hips nearly wider than her shoulders dropping to thick legs without form.

The tears started again and she flipped her body over, slamming her fist to the floor in a passionate rage against herself. She shoved two fingers down her throat and beckoned her lunch away from her. Acid burned as it left her body and she cried again, defeated by their words. She gasped for air after she finished purging herself of the toxins, the poison that would kill her slowly by giving more reason for their hurtful remarks. They killed her and they never knew for she only raised her chin, squared her shoulders and choked back the tears, making plans to remove the next meal from her body as soon as she swallowed the last bite.

Her chest was sore from her heaving breaths, coughs, and sobs as she reached for the razor to attack her hips. The pain that raced across her skin tried to remove his pleading looks from her thoughts but his face reappeared as she thought of what she was doing to herself, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care any more, to hell with him. He didn’t understand her pain and disgust, and he never would.

She heard the front door of her home open and the sound of her parents’ laughter floated in. Quickly she started the shower and climbed in. Cold water stung her body as the heavy blood twisted and swirled down the drain.

Joyce whispers harshly, “Daddy…Daddy get up!”

Joyce pushes the lump of a man laying on the wet street as hard as her little arms can, barely budging the mountain.

“Daddy, I heard something.”

The little girl crawls through puddles of water and mounds of trash on the broken asphalt to get around the man. She leans in, close to his face, and quickly wipes the overly-filthy hair from hers. She studies her daddy’s face. After a few moments of investigating, she gives him a look of confusion and sighs. Joyce slowly crawls back around the man to her original spot and sits on her feet. She picks up her security blanket, her Elmo; whose color is quite dark and far from it’s original bright red. Holding it in front of her, she looks directly into its big smoke stained eyes.

“Daddy’s still sleeping.”

“I tried! He don’t wanna get up.”

Joyce carefully seats the stuffed animal down on the asphalt and takes a second to make sure he is comfortable. She reaches for an olive-drab duffle bag sitting next to her father and starts to dig through it. After tossing out various empty wrappers and aluminum cans onto the street, near the bottom of the bag she finds a bent granola bar. She keeps searching the bag for another option but finds none. Joyce sits down with her legs crossed, unwraps the bar and bites into it. She rocks her head from side to side and hums as she chews. She looks down at Elmo, who’s obviously looking directly at the granola bar.

“Want some?”

Joyce stuffs the bar in Elmo’s big mouth and makes a munching sound for him. Then she again wipes her dingy hair from her equally dirty face.

“You like it?”

“I don't”

Time passes, her eyes get droopy and she lays down next to her father for the night.

The sun rises.

“Daddy…Daddy, get up!”

The little girl stands and walks over to give Elmo the news.

“He don’t wanna get up”

Joyce’s stomach starts to cause her pain so she lays down next to her father in hopes of comfort. At around midday, the aches become too much to bear. Joyce gets up.

“Daddy, we’re going to go find something to eat, okay? We’ll be back”

She takes off a thin purple bracelet from her wrist and lays it on her father. Making sure to grab her companion, she heads down the middle of the street on her search. As she walks, she talks to Elmo.

“Daddy said we gotta keep moving, but we’re not, huh?”

“Maybe daddy will be up when we get back?”

Joyce puts more distance between herself and the abandoned tunnel, which has been her refuge for the past few days. In the back of her mind, she knows that there is something very wrong with her father not waking once. At least she has some sort of company on her journey. Hours pass.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re eyes are itchy? Let me see.”

Joyce brings Elmo to her face and looks into his eyes.

“It’s cause you got dust in your eyes.”

Joyce slaps and rubs at her friend’s big plastic eyeballs.

“You are cured!”

During her search, Joyce comes across an old Volkswagen Beetle. The vehicle is full of trash, but nothing to ease her hunger. Continuing on, she comes to a roadblock, made by a car pile-up. Night is coming, she is starving, and her only option is to turn back.

While still some distance from the tunnel, Joyce notices something near the entrance. The little girl is shocked and scared of what she is seeing. Men in funny-looking white suits, military helmets and masks with tubes leading to their backs. As soon as Joyce notices they are holding guns, she runs.

One man, investigating inside the tunnel, picks up a purple bracelet off a corpse. Another hears faint footsteps.

Joyce runs toward the broke down Volkswagen, and trips over her feet. She scrapes her knees and arms as she lands, but tries not to cry. She stands up carefully and turns, to find two men standing directly in front of her. She stares at them with wide eyes, squeezing her stuffed animal as tightly as she can.

One of the men speaks, “We got one here”

The man then gets on his knee and shines a small light in Joyce’s eye. After a brief examination, the man touches a headphone attached to his ear.

“That’s affirmative”

The man takes a step away from Joyce, then points his gun directly at her. Joyce stares in shock, deeper and deeper into the barrel, until everything she sees is black.

It was in early June that he suddenly lost his way.

He was at a plush conference center in the Rocky Mountains, giving a talk about how his work would finally solve a problem that was critically important to all of the attendees: They'd crowded into the early-morning session just to hear him, hanging on every word, hoping he had the answer that they were searching for. Of course he had their answer. He almost always had answers; it was a talent of his, and a burden.

The talk should have been a highlight of his career, but he didn't feel proud. Instead, he felt lonely; he had no one to share in his triumph. It was his life's work; he'd neglected his friends and family to achieve it, believing that the sacrifice was justifiable.

It wasn't. The realization left him weak-kneed. He fled the building with the sounds of applause still ringing in his ears. He kept walking, following a path that led away from the resort and up the side of the mountain, away from everyone. He needed to be alone.

He'd been feeling the urge to escape frequently, but he'd ignored it, focusing instead on solving everybody else's problems. Now he was overwhelmed with the emotions that had been building for months, if not years. Walking away somehow felt right; he'd keep walking until he figured something out. That's what he did best; he figured things out.

He walked uphill, along a winding path through aspen woodlands, a dense community of nearly-white tree trunks standing in the deep green background of a pretty little fern-covered glen. He wound his way amidst the trees, barely seeing the place, let alone appreciating its beauty. The woods eventually gave way to sub-alpine evergreens clinging to steeper, rockier, more austere terrain.

Austere.

His life had become austere, and he hadn't even noticed. He'd had no time for his friends; they'd drifted away. His colleagues avoided him. And his wife had gone her own way. Would she ever again be approachable, granting him at least the level of affection she gave the stupid cat? Could he ever again touch her without her pulling away? Could he make her happy again?

Could he be happy again? The gray jays in the bristlecone pines were happy enough. Their songs filled the air. He ignored them, engrossed in his problem, striding towards an uncertain future. He reached the snow fields, rapidly receding in the late spring warmth, rivulets running into ever-larger streams, thundering down the boulder fields now below him. The snow grew deeper, and although he was ill-prepared, he continued on. He skirted the deepest drifts, trying to stay on top of the icy crust, hopping from boulder to boulder when he could, slipping now and then on the steep slope and occasionally losing his footing. Soon the trees gave way to shrubs; the forest ended, and he was exposed, alone on the mountainside.

Alone.

He'd been depending on a good friend, relying on her to lessen to fill his loneliness. It was a platonic, yet spiritual relationship. He'd thought it was innocent, but she'd ended it, fearing the slippery slope, worried about losing her way, honoring her vows to forsake all others. Forsaking him. His need to use that label was a sign that she was right. The hole left by her absence confirmed it. His own actions led to this dark place. So, what was the answer?

He was near the summit now, high above the tree line, and the snow fields were more exposed to the sun and melting away entirely. Wildflowers were everywhere. Cinquefoils, primroses, and wallflowers intermingled to make a lush yellow and green carpet. Snow-covered peaks thrust into the impossibly blue sky beyond sheer cliffs to the right and the left. The valley lay behind him, but there were no answers there. Ahead, the flowers ended, but the mountain continued to rise, rockier, more barren, demanding to be climbed, tugging on his soul.

His eyes fell upon a lonely alpine sunflower, pointed toward the sun. It was the only sunflower he could see, a solitary blossom in the midst of thousands of blooms of other varieties. It was merely a foot high, but it nevertheless towered over the other flowers, as if to lead them, to show them the where the warmth was. An overachiever, like himself. Strong. Proud. Vigorous.

Vigorous?

He suddenly realized that the sunflower wasn't the leader of the meadow, but a late arrival. The sunflower could take root only because generations of other plants had turned rock into soil. It was succeeding not so much on its own, but because of the efforts of others. He sat on a rock for an hour, looking at the sunflower, thinking about its lessons.

He left the mountain a different man.

He opened his eyes, blinking under the glare of the bulb in the ceiling of his concrete cell.

Was it morning already? The small window was angled so that he could see only a shaft of sky. Keeping the inmates disoriented was one of their security measures.

Robert sat up, bumping his head against the poured concrete desk. He was on the floor, which was where he often found himself after a particularly delusional night.

Isolation does funny things to a man's mind.

In another life he had crusaded against the injustices of the establishment. When his letters went unanswered and his manifestos unpublished, he had walked into a federal courthouse with an automatic rifle. On the outside he had been a threat to the system; on the inside he was simply Prisoner 9178-3, confined to a seven-by-twelve-foot chamber. The only other person he ever saw was Lenny, who delivered his meals and escorted him to the yard for his hour of daily exercise. In the real world Robert had been a loner, avoiding interpersonal contact, but now that it was denied to him he craved it. His occasional visits from Lenny, and the insipid educational programming available on his small television set, were his only links to humanity.

Robert looked at the door, wondering when breakfast would arrive, and —

My God. The door.

Robert stood. The door to his cell, which had clanged shut behind him every day for the past ten years as he returned from the yard, was standing wide open.

"Lenny?" he called out, his voice bouncing flatly off the soundproofed walls. "Anybody? My door is open. Is my door supposed to be open?"

It struck him as a silly thing to say — he was caged like a dog in this room, and now, finding the door ajar, his first response was to call someone's attention to it so they could lock him up again. But he'd already had a steel mirror taken away as punishment for throwing his food on the floor in a rage, and he had no desire to see further punitive measures taken.

"Hello? Anybody there?"

Hearing nothing, he hesitantly shuffled to the doorway and peered out into the corridor.

It was empty.

Robert stayed in his cell for a further three hours. He knew that this oversight was the prison's fault, not his — but he also knew he'd be penalized if they found him out and unescorted.

However, when lunchtime came and went with no sign of Lenny, the rumbling in Robert's stomach emboldened him. This was gross neglect, and his lawyer would hear of it. If they weren't going to come and see that his door was open, then darn it, he would go find someone and point it out to them.

Robert wandered slowly down the corridor, feeling naked with his shackles. The other cell doors were open as well, giving rise to the unpleasant possibility that other, more dangerous criminals were lurking about. But where were they? The guard station at the end of his cell block was unmanned, and the electronic doors were open.

This is impossible.

He passed rows of security cameras. Usually they would sweep back and forth, their electronic eyes alert for disorder, but today they were still and silent. Robert kept waiting to hear the blare of an alarm or the shout of an officer. But nothing of the kind happened, and everywhere he went he encountered an unlocked door ... an abandoned guard post ... an open gate. A short time later, he was walking out through the employee entrance, feeling warm sunlight for the first time in a decade.

What should have been a rewarding breath of fresh air was heavy with an oppressive sense of dread.

The lot was full of parked cars as on a typical weekday, but he saw no people driving or milling around. He saw no traffic on the highway. He saw no airplanes among the clouds.

What in heaven's name is going on?

Robert made his way past the empty gatehouse on the frontage road. He walked for over an hour, a frightened man in khaki prison fatigues, until he came to a McDonald's. It couldn't have been later than three in the afternoon, but the restaurant was empty. So was the 24-hour supermarket next door.

In the store manager's office, Robert picked up the phone and dialed the operator, desperate to escape the crushing loneliness, the terrible prison of loneliness. The voice in his ear was soothing and mild.

"Good morning, Robert. Time to take your meds."

He opened his eyes, blinking under the glare of the bulb in the ceiling of his padded room.

There was the soft sound of the steel tray in his door sliding into place.

"Lenny," Robert said, not rising, waiting as the episode passed and faded like a dissipating cloud.

"Thank you, Lenny," he whispered, choking back grateful tears.

Johnson staggered through the woods. He occasionally stopped to shout at the trees, or the squirrels that chattered at him from the higher branches. It didn't matter. He wasn't yelling words anymore.

Johnson was most notorious serial killer of his day. Even he had no idea of how many people he had sent to their maker. He didn't care. It wasn't important. What was important was the power. He would look into their eyes and watch for that moment when his victims realized that no matter what they did he was going to kill them, slowly. He lived for that look. Man or woman, adult or child, they all gave it to him.

Then they caught him. He was searched and put in chains. They loaded him on a chopper to move him to a secure location. But this wasn't the first time they had caught him. He was prepared - a needle under his skin here, another there. Three inches is enough to reach the heart once the hands are free. Even cops die, and guns in dead hands are weapons for anyone. Two were wasted, dead before they knew it, but the last knew his death was upon him. Mortally wounded by the cops' own bullets the chopper crashed in the mountains.

He watched the last of them die, then he picked a direction and started walking. It wouldn't be long before he found a road, a track, a hydro line. Something would show him the way back to civilization. Johnson limped through the woods eating the berries when he found them. At first it was quieter than he liked. He couldn't hear traffic. There were no sirens. None of the noise of his prey. He was alone.

Soon he started hearing other noises. Rustling in the leaves. Creaking in the distance. The buzzing of the flies that found him and tormented him with their biting. It smelled wrong too. There was a sharp scent that underlay everything. Occasionally he got whiffs of strong musky odours. He found himself stopping to listen, to smell. His legs ached and burned.

Night brought relief from the flies, but the high pitched whine of mosquitoes took over. In the dark the noises seemed to be closer. New sounds were added until he walked through a cacophony that assaulted him from every direction. The temperature dropped until his teeth chattered adding his own notes to the sounds of the night. Finally he curled up against a tree and, partially buried in leaves, managed to sleep.

He woke with a shout as something tickled his face. He jumped to his feet scraping at his face until it bled. The sun warmed him and brought the flies. The trees rustled and laughed at him. He shouted and the noise retreated. All morning he limped on stiff legs. Whenever the noise became too much he would shout curses into the forest. The forest absorbed his words with no echo.

Something was following him. He could hear the sound of footsteps behind him, or off to the left or the right. He would stop and spin yelling. Nothing was there. Then he fell into the creek. He was cold and shivering now. His wordless shouts were getting hoarser. The light was fading again when he tripped on a root and fell into a tree. A sharp branch stabbed his face a fraction of an inch from his eye. The trees were after him. They wanted his blood. He lurched to his feet and staggered away.

He couldn't escape them. They surrounded him. They taunted him and tortured him. He was shaking so uncontrollably that he could do no more than growl through the clatter of his teeth, He fell again and heard bones snap in his ankle. He curled up in a ball and cried himself to sleep.

Morning came to mock him with light and warmth. His ankle screamed in agony. He couldn't force himself to his feet. He tried to drag himself, but he had no strength left. The forest had won. It was going to kill him. The worst thing was the realization that it didn't care.

Johnson stared up at the blue sky and felt it - the look. He was going to die. He closed his eyes and waited for the end.